Saturday, January 3, 2009

My 27 year-old son was just visiting. He was here for a week. Of course, I talked about Islamic supremacism quite a bit, and being 27 (and from Southern California), my son was trying to find every way he could to not believe it. I could tell from his responses that he was thinking, "This can't be true; Dad must be exaggerating or reading only a small fringe source of information or something."

One night as we were talking, he got on my laptop and asked me, "How do you spell Mohammad?" And then, "How do you spell Qur'an?" I didn't know what he was doing, but then he said, "I'll be damned."

He was looking on Osho's web site. He is a big fan of Osho, a spiritual teacher from India who writes on every religion, revealing the shared, universal, spiritual nature at the core of every religion (or as we found out, almost every religion).

My son assumed that since Osho has written a book on every religion (and praised the core teachings of every one of them), Osho must have written one on Islam, and my son was going to read it and get "the other side of the story." But what he found was that Osho has not written about Islam, and not only that, he explained why he hasn't. Here is what Osho said:

Mohammed was an absolutely illiterate man, and the Koran, in which his sayings are collected, is ninety-nine percent rubbish. You can just open the book anywhere and read it, and you will be convinced of what I am saying. I am not saying on a certain page — anywhere. You just open the book accidentally, read the page and you will be convinced of what I am saying.

Whatsoever one percent truth there is here and there in the Koran is not Mohammed's. It is just ordinary, ancient wisdom that uneducated people collect easily — more easily than the educated people, because educated people have far better sources of information — books, libraries, universities, scholars. The uneducated, simply by hearing the old people, collect a few words of wisdom here and there. And those words are significant, because for thousands of years they have been tested and found somehow true. So it is the wisdom of the ages that is scattered here and there; otherwise, it is the most ordinary book possible in the world.

Muslims have been asking me, "Why don't you speak on the Koran? You have spoken on The Bible, on the Gita, this and that." I could not say to them that it is all rubbish; I simply went on postponing. Even just before I went into silence, a Muslim scholar sent the latest English version of the Koran, praying me to speak on it. But now I have to say that it is all rubbish, that is why I have not spoken on it — because why unnecessarily waste time?

- From Unconciousness to ConsciousnessChapter 5 by Osho

To those of us who study Islam, this is very mild criticism, but coming from Osho, it is severe and harsh, and made an impression on my son.

1 comments:

India is often called the land of ‘god-men’. This is due to the abundance of so-called spiritual masters in India. Many of these ‘babas’ and ‘saints’ have a large following in many countries. Islam abhors deification of any human being. To understand the Islamic stand towards such pretenders to divinity, let us analyze one such ‘god-man’, Osho Rajneesh.

Let us put this candidate, ‘Bhagwan’ Rajneesh, to the test of Surah Ikhlas, the touchstone of theology:

1.The first criterion is “Say, He is Allah, one and only”. Is Rajneesh one and only? No! Rajneesh was one among the multitude of ‘spiritual teachers’ produced by India. Some disciples of Rajneesh might still hold that Rajneesh is one and only.

2.The second criterion is, ‘Allah is absolute and eternal’. We know from Rajneesh’s biography that he was suffering from diabetes, asthma, and chronic backache. He alleged that the U.S. Government gave him slow poison in prison. Imagine Almighty God being poisoned! Rajneesh was thus, neither absolute nor eternal.

3.The third criterion is ‘He begets not, nor is He begotten’. We know that Rajneesh was born in Jabalpur in India and had a mother as well as a father who later became his disciples.

In May 1981 he went to U.S.A. and established a town called ‘Rajneeshpuram’. He later fell foul of the West and was finally arrested and asked to leave the country. He came back to India and started a commune in Pune which is now known as the ‘Osho’ commune. He died in 1990. The followers of Osho Rajneesh believe that he is Almighty God. At the ‘Osho commune’ in Pune one can find the following epitaph on his tombstone:“Osho – never born, never died; only visited the planet Earth between 11th December 1931 to 19th January 1990.”They forget to mention that he was not granted visa for 21 countries of the world. Can a person ever imagine ‘God’ visiting the earth, and requiring a visa to enter a country! The Archbishop of Greece said that if Rajneesh had not been deported, they would have burnt his house and those of his disciples.

4. The fourth test, which is the most stringent is, “There is none like unto Him”. The moment you can imagine or compare ‘God’ to anything, then he (the candidate to divinity) is not God. It is not possible to conjure up a mental picture of the One True God. We know that Rajneesh was a human being, having two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth and a white flowing beard. Photographs and posters of Rajneesh are available in plenty. The moment you can imagine or draw a mental picture of an entity, then that entity is not God.

Many are tempted to make anthropomorphic comparisons of God. Take for instance, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the famous body builder and Hollywood actor, who won the title of ‘Mr. Universe’, the strongest man in the world. Let us suppose that someone says that Almighty God is a thousand times stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger. The moment you can compare any entity to God, whether the comparison is to Schwarzenegger or to King Kong, whether it is a thousand times or a million times stronger, it fails the Qur’anic criterion, “There is none like unto Him”.Thus, the ‘acid test’ cannot be passed by anyone except the One True God. The following verse of the Glorious Qur’an conveys a similar message:

“No vision can grasp Him But His grasp is over All vision: He is Above all comprehension, Yet is acquainted with all things.” [Al-Qur'an 6:103]

Getting Through

Click on the book's image to learn more about it.

Take the Pledge

Some people say Islam is a religion of peace and that Islam has been hijacked by extremists, terrorists, and stealth jihadists who twist and distort the peaceful teachings of the Quran and quote it out of context.

Others say that political, supremacist, and even violent teachings are fundamental to Islam, and that people who say otherwise either haven’t read the Quran or are protecting Islam with religious deception (taqiyya).

The general confusion about the nature of Islam makes us collectively unable to make informed decisions. You can help end this confusion by reading the Quran. Stop believing what other people say and find out for yourself.

Many Types of Jihad

The bag of non-violent tactics used by the jihadists is deep indeed. Over the last few decades they have perfected a series of effective Jihads against the non-Muslim world while it slumbered in its politically-correct dream-world. There are many Jihads the Islamists use and they all support their ultimate goal — an Islamic world ruled by Shari'a Law. Here they are: